Let me tell you what the dollar did.
In the 2022 Arkansas legislative cycle, Americans United for Life and allied organizations moved money — tracked in lobbying disclosures at figures running into the hundreds of thousands — to sustain and defend Act 180, the Arkansas Human Life Protection Act, a near-total abortion ban that took effect the day Roe fell. That money bought language. The language bought silence in the statute where a medical exception should have been written plain. The silence landed on Emily Waldorf.
September 16, 2024. A Sunday morning in Arkansas. Emily's preschooler walked into the bathroom and found her mother curled on the floor. Emily was miscarrying. The pregnancy was not viable. The tissue was not clearing. She was bleeding, and she was afraid, and she had already made the calls — to her doctor, to the hospital, to people who said they wanted to help but said the law would not let them say yes.
She called the governor's office. That is a thing a person should not have to do when her body is failing. That is a thing that should not be required. The governor's office did not make the bleeding stop.
Here is what the money bought, specifically: it bought a law with a medical exception so narrow and so vaguely written that the physicians who read it could not agree on when it applied, and so the physicians — who were not trying to be cruel, who were afraid of losing their licenses, who were afraid of criminal prosecution — waited. And Emily waited with them, on the bathroom floor first, then in whatever room they let her wait in, while the law and its funders sat at a distance and felt nothing.
The Americans United for Life Action Fund reported over $2.3 million in expenditures in the electoral cycle surrounding Dobbs. Some of that is in Arkansas now. Some of it is in the statute. Some of it was on the floor with Emily Waldorf on a Sunday in September.
I am not going to tell you Emily is a symbol. She is a woman with a preschooler who calls for her in the morning. She had a name before this happened to her and she has it still. She told her story because she wanted it told plain, not dressed up, not turned into a campaign mailer.
So here it is plain: the money moved, the law was written, the exception was left narrow on purpose, and on September 16, 2024, Emily Waldorf's child walked into the bathroom and found her mother on the floor, and no one with a checkbook in this story was in that room except her.